The Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead is trying to outdo Birmingham with its  adult social services cuts. It’s even been singled out for praise by the Taxpayers Alliance.

In November 2009, £569,000 worth of cuts in adult social care were added to the £993,000 already agreed in October – a cut of £1.5m .

All of this means that  continuing adult social care and services for those with learning difficulties will be badly hit  with a  day centre closing. Three posts will go from The learning disability service will lose posts, as will homecare management and adult social care assessment.

This is a council where one quarter (12 out of 50) social worker posts were vacant before Xmas, posts that were covered by agency social workers who cost about £20,000 more than directly employed staff each year.

Read about it (complete with pathetic photo pose) at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/7036554/Windsor-and-Maidenhead-council-makes-history-with-biggest-ever-cut-in-council-tax.html

An excellent blog on the need for assertiveness by social workers (and in particular by Approved Mental Health Professionals has just appeared on Community Care’s web site. Clare Bareham asks why social workers dont ask “why” as much as they should, or perhaps used to.

It’s a thoughtful piece that is well worth reading at:

http://www.communitycare.co.uk/blogs/social-work-front-line-focus/2010/02/were-a-challenge-of-social-worker-and-we-demand-respect.html

I am not usually a fan of the Daily Mail but Eileen Fairweather has written a brilliant story every social worker should read.

It has direct relevance for social workers because the scapegoating of  Detective Chief Inspector Philip Wheeler parallels that of social worker Lisa Arthurworrey.

In January 10th 2002,  Detective Chief Inspector Philip Wheeler had just started giving evidence to Lord Laming’s inquiry into the murder of Victoria Climbie whenhe was physically attcked and went off sick.

Eileen Fairweather writes

“Wheeler had been based at North West London Police Murder Squad at the time of the eight-year-old’s death in 2000. He had been describing to the inquiry a report he wrote warning his superiors that child protection locally was not being properly supervised.

“Wheeler was signed off work. During his enforced break from giving evidence to the inquiry, colleagues made him the scapegoat for police failings. He says he was ‘framed’ when, in fact, he was the officer who rang alarm bells.

“It is only now, ten years later – his health and career ruined – that he has been able to clear his name.”

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1247294/Met-officer-scapegoated-Victoria-Climbie-inquiry-finally-clears-name.html#ixzz0eZBwKJBy

Roger Kline says

“The parallels with Lisa Arthurworrey are all to clear to those who have followed her case. Both cases should shame those who have colluded with the disagraceful treatment of colleagues to the detriment of the public interest”.

More on Lisa’s case in the near future

Cases of public sector fraud and data manipulation are set to increase over the coming months as government spending cuts put more pressure on managers to meet performance targets, experts have warned.

Ian Elliott, who leads the government and public sector forensic services practice at PricewaterhouseCoopers, told Public Finance that data manipulation was on the rise in public sector organisations in the face of tighter budgets, particularly among NHS trusts striving to meet waiting list targets.

His practice was experiencing a 50% increase in investigations compared with this time last year, with many cases larger in size too .

More at:

http://www.publicfinance.co.uk/news/2009/10/spending-cuts-will-increase-fraud-say-experts/

New research suggests the number of violent deaths among children in England and Wales has fallen by almost 40% since 1974.

A Bournemouth University study says the death rate is the fourth lowest in the Western world.

It says better monitoring by social workers and improved liaison between health visitors, paediatricians, GPs and police had led to the drop.

The BBC news report can be f ound at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8497277.stm

The most valuable resource that councils have is their staff. This was recognised by the Laming report and the Task Force report contained a number of good recommendations which if implemented would make a real difference.

The Social Work Reform Board which met for the first time this week had a constructive first meeting at which Aspect was represented by Roger Kline.

Three elephants crowded into the room. the first was the uncertainty caused by the imminent General election. The second one was the view that local councils should not be bound by prescriptive national standards. And the third was the financial pressures on local authorities.

Politicians have been been claiming that front line  services will be protected and it will be “less essential” “back room” services that will be affected but as Birmingham childrens services staff found out last week this rings a little hollow when hundreds of front line jobs are threatened.

In explaining the miserable decision to offer O% in a week when inflation rose sharply and when staff are facing increases in pensions and national insurance contributions, Local Government Employers managing director Jan Parkinson said: “The decision not to offer employees an increase in basic pay this year has not been taken lightly.

“Councils are facing a perfect storm of falling revenues and increasing demand for services. Up and down the country, councils have already been forced to cut thousands of jobs to balance the books. Town halls have been swept by the cold winds of recession for more than a year and that means difficult choices have to be made.”

Much is made of  the distinction between “front line” staff and others when cuts are discussed. This is often meaningless.  Are administrative support staff working with social workers not essential if the administrative burden on social workers is to be reduced? Are IT staff not essential if front line staff are not going to waste even more time due to a combintion of inappropriate IT systems and poor equipment?

Social services have bizarrely been excluded from the protection offered to education and health services. The consequences threaten to be dire, not just for staff who will be expected to do more for less, but for services.

We await with interest the government’s Task Force report Implementation Plan which will seek to square this circle